Once in a while – and it happens rarely – you encounter a place that for some reason chimes with you. It happened to me when I went to Japan, and it occurred again earlier this summer when I visited Sweden to see a potential new client. It was the first time I had been to this part of the world and as we drove the three hours north from the airport, the country began to reveal itself. The pristine highways, empty by British standards, soon gave way to a more distinctive network of roads leading into the forest. Elk-crossing signs and trucks laden with timber were the few things to be seen among the tree trunks; occasionally the forest would open up to reveal a silvery expanse of water fingering its way between the islands and dark, reflective shores.

My client told me she had moved there from Holland, to be part of a culture that had been formed by the power of the land from which inhabitants had eked out a living. Summer holidays were 10 weeks long with good reason, because the children were expected to work on the land when the light was good and there was harvest to bring in. It was an outdoor life when the season was with them, but the winters were real and uncompromising.

My client had acquired a farmstead set in a clearing a 15-minute walk from a lake. The log-cabin buildings dated back to the 18th century. A square and central farmhouse, drawn like a child might imagine a home, formed the centrepiece, and sat among the barns, outbuildings and enclosures that set the farmstead apart from the forest. In the evening light the distinctive buildings – mineral red, black-doored and white-windowed – seemed to shimmer against the omnipresent verdancy.

It was clear that what we would need to create here was a garden that was as much farm as it was garden, and in the name of research we ventured out to Rashult, the birthplace of the great botanist Carl Nilsson Linnaeus.

Rashult is a government-funded project which aims to show how an 18th-century smallholding would have functioned. The farm is described as a "cultural landscape" and the centrepiece is Linnaeus's log cabin, complete with turf roof and bark guttering. It was good to see how the living roofs hunkered the buildings down into the landscape. They were incredibly beautiful, with a whole ecology in evidence: ferns springing from the shady side of the granite chimney piece, harebells and scabious dancing among the fuzz of seeding grasses.

To the side of the house, a tiny apothecary garden created a sanctuary from the all-pervasive forests and across a cobbled courtyard a series of further enclosures framed additional growing spaces. The need to fence out stock and wildlife and to parcel off the land for growing had driven the aesthetic of the enclosures and I was interested to discover that the white-picket fences that have become so iconic in North America were a legacy of Swedish emigration in the mid-1800s. The fences were absolutely stunning, with juniper uprights tapering skyward and a "lay" of spruce, tied and knotted with wands of spruce that had been stripped and heated in a fire to make them pliable enough to bend.

The contents of the gardens were based on Linnaeus's notes on the 220 plants in his father's garden. Hop poles soared skyward within the enclosures, each vine planted on a little mound of Alpine strawberry. Elsewhere the plants were laid out in orderly rows, herbs mixed with vegetables, and flowers with fruit. Straw bedding formed a cushion-soft mulch on the paths to provide workable walkways.

The surrounding fields were small, the closest cultivated with a heritage rye over 1m tall. Within each of the surrounding fields were mounds of stones assembled during the field clearance, giving evidence of cultivation dating back to the bronze age. Many of the piles sported a nut tree or a pollarded lime, which would have been protected from the livestock by the rocks. The foliage of the lime would have been gathered for winter fodder, the bark stripped to make rope. Further out, the fields gave way to the meadows – "the mothers of cultivated fields", as the saying has it.

We ate a hearty lunch, gathered from the smallholding, in the cafeteria, before heading home with our heads full of ideas. A square of land and a window of sky would be all we needed to lift the farmstead out of the forest. It would be a place that relied upon tradition and traditional know-how – and would be all the better for its simplicity.

Tip Box

A double fence of four feet tall, with a four foot gap, will keep the out deer out. They do not like to make the jump and you can keep chickens in the gap between.

The need to fence out stock and wildlife and parcel off the land for growing had driven the aesthetic of the fences and I was interested to discover that the white picket fences that have become so iconic in North America were a legacy of Swedish emigration there in the mid 1800s.